India’s Missing Daughters

Thursday • July 13, 2006

Can anything break the commitment of ideological feminists to abortion? A report out of India will test that question. According to The Daily Mail [London], at least 10 million baby girls have been aborted in India over the last twenty years – and likely millions more.

The traditional Indian preference for sons is driving this development – now aided by technologies that identify the sex of the fetus and a culture that accepts abortion.

“Asking me why I need a son, instead of a daughter, is like asking me why I have two eyes and not one,” said one woman who has just had an abortion after discovering that the baby she was carrying was female.

This woman is by no means alone in taking such shocking and drastic measures to avoid giving birth to a girl. In fact, such is the widespread determination to produce only sons that, since ultrasound scans became widely available in the Eighties, the number of abortions carried out on female foetuses in India has risen at a terrifying pace.

Even by the most conservative estimates, sex-selective abortion in India now accounts for the termination of some ten million female fetuses over the past 20 years. That means that each year a staggering half a million girls have been prevented from being born.

One Indian doctor now predicts that “At this pace we’ll soon have no girls born in the country. We don’t know where it will stop.”

It won’t stop until we recognize elective abortion for what it is – murder in the womb. Just ask India’s missing daughters. Where is the feminist outrage?